Hundreds of years ago, wallpaper looked very different than the simple repeating patterns we often see today. Originally done on wood blocks, early designs were extremely decorative, colorful, and labor-intensive. “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” is the latest exhibit at the RISD Museum, featuring samples of salvaged wallpapers, fragments and drawings of designs from the 18th and 19th centuries. Morning host Luis Hernandez visited the exhibit to talk with Emily Banas, the museum’s Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design.
Interview highlights
Emily Banas: What is really exciting about this exhibition is that it showcases so many different forms of wallpaper, many more than I think most people would ever be familiar with. Most people have ideas about what wallpaper is and what it looks like. Typically, that’s repeating patterns, most often floral patterns. But wallpapers were so much more. They really drew inspiration from so many different sources, from architecture, textiles, classical imagery, of course, florals were very popular, but there’s a lot of design sources that all go into inspiring the specific forms of wallpaper that didn’t just cover the wall in repeating patterns, but were really made as singular pieces of artwork in and of themselves.
Banas: Some of these colors are so bright and so bold, you get everything from pinks and baby blues to bright, almost traffic cone orange colors that most people wouldn’t associate with this time period. For me, it really reminds me that these spaces were filled with color, that they were filled with a variety of images, and that there was really this kind of playfulness and joy that came with using this material. People often would cut up wallpapers and arrange them in different ways in their homes. And again, I think that that is also something that is really surprising, that people had so much agency over this material. They used it in different ways, and they often repaired it when it got damaged. That tells me that it really meant a lot to people, that this was a work of art that they cared for, just like any other.
Banas: I really hope that people get a sense of what these spaces were like during this time period, that they were incredibly colorful and bright, that there were so many layers of design and pattern happening, and that this material is something that is not really in the past, but it’s something that’s very present even today. I think we are hopefully moving away from kind of a white and beige color palette to coming back to thinking about how we can really fill our spaces in a very thoughtful way with design and color.
“The Art of French Wallpaper Design” is on now at the RISD Museum through May 11.
